


Things I Didn't Want

by Kastaka



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Dungeon, F/M, Restraints, Sex Pollen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-24
Updated: 2013-01-24
Packaged: 2017-11-26 17:54:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/652892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kastaka/pseuds/Kastaka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Oh well - this will have to do. I must say, I'm disappointed they didn't bring the Captain. The playboy, the monster and the girls; it doesn't quite have the same... resonance."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things I Didn't Want

They left him free, of course.  
  
He had been concentrating since they woke up; a muffled feeling of being manhandled, endless dark corridors, and _the other guy_ behind his eyes; asking, hoping, rising towards the surface...  
  
...but no. He didn't know what his surroundings were like. And when the rough hessian bag was removed from his head, he spared a moment to be glad - to be glad that the sudden awful thought with which he submerged _him_ for the moment had not come to pass.  
  
There was not much room here. And it looked like these walls were solid rock. He didn't think for a moment it would _hold_ the other guy - but god knows what they were underneath, and he didn't want to think too hard about how unpleasant it would be on the way out.  
  
Also, all of the others would probably have died in the resulting cave-in.   
  
Tony Stark sniffed the air, looked around. "Underground," he said, in a slightly strangled tone. Then he fixed Bruce Banner with a wild stare. "Aren't you going to _do_ something?" he demands. Anger covers the pleading that would be in his tone, that just about made it into his eyes.  
  
Jane leaned back against the wall; resigned, trying minutely to shift and find any slight affordance of comfort that she could. It was clear from her blank expression that she did not really believe this was happening. Obviously it was just some kind of strange nightmare; she'd wake up soon, right?  
  
Darcy was also slumped back against the wall, although she seemed to be suffering from fewer comforting illusions. Instead, she looked really, sincerely pissed off with the world in general. From time to time, she offered up comments like "They even took my taser!"  
  
Pepper was... not taking this so well. She looked exhausted, and alternated between her eyes being closed and staring blankly and despairingly into a reality only she can see; there were tear tracks down her face, and there was something wrong with her wrists from where she had pulled, hard, against her restraints.  
  
He headed over to Pepper first, ignoring Tony entirely, even though the Iron Man's gaze followed him accusingly - until it risked seeing Pepper, and he flinched away from the sight. Very gently, Bruce lifted one limp hand, trying to stay dispassionate as he examined the damage.   
  
Mostly, the skin had bunched up and broken in a ragged ring where it was stretched against the unyielding metal. He looked up and down the line of them, assessing what supplies he might have to hand. Concluded that his jumper is the best padding; took it off, tied each sleeve very gently around the damaged areas. Now at least the shackles shouldn't cut any deeper, he thought.  
  
He made the mistake of looking at the blood on his hands. It shouldn't have bothered him like that. He'd had plenty of bleeding patients. But the helplessness... it was starting to get to him.  
  
The other guy thrummed through his weedy scientist muscles, bunching up under the skin, willing him to grow - to become - to _do something_ , as Stark so kindly put it.  
  
"No," he said, hands in fists, staring at the ground; forcing it back down, keeping it at bay. He knew better than to argue, than to reason: he put all of his concentration into calm, into meditation, into being somewhere dark and quiet and peaceful.  
  
"No, really, I mean it," said Stark, suddenly; he'd been staring at a point in the middle distance, lost in some kind of trance or reverie, and he snapped out of it as if the intervening time had never passed. "This is bad. This is very bad. Can't you just. I mean. Just in your hands or something. Or..." he gave the shackle an experimental tug. "Or maybe something with the bolts..." He craned around to get a better look at the shackles; he couldn't quite see where his were attached, but he could see the next ones over, on Jane.  
  
He carefully didn't look in the other direction, where Pepper had started sobbing quietly again.  
  
"If you can, hmm," he thought aloud. "Maybe you could use... no, they've thought of that, they don't quite reach. Ugh. Help me out here, will you?"  
  
But Stark was easy to tune out; it was Jane, making a small, quiet, private noise of discomfort, that broke into his calm world. He wasn't quite as on the verge of it as he had been, so he risked opening his eyes. Nothing had really changed, but he was on top of it for now.  
  
"Tony," he said, wearily. "I am only just keeping myself from killing us all. Can you please, just for a moment, shut up?"  
  
\----  
  
"Here will do fine, thanks," she said, opening the side door and instinctively checking the street.  
  
Clint got out of the front seat, looking up, for vantage points. She shook her head, sadly. "Going to be close work, I'm afraid," she said, dropping to one knee next to an anonymous manhole cover.  
  
"Oh great," he said. "It's not like lines of sight are terrible underground or anything."  
  
"Do not fear!" thundered a mighty voice from the other side of the car. "Although I do not know why we could not have flown here. Are we not already quite obvious on this deserted street?"  
  
"Not as obvious as a lightning storm," observed Natasha as she attached a couple of handles, lifted the cover, and detached the handles again. "Talking of obvious..."  
  
"You would like me to be the vanguard in this skirmish?" he boomed.  
  
"More like a diversion," she muttered for Clint's benefit, while smiling, nodding, and gesturing towards the deep black hole.  
  
Like a thunderclap, he dived. Clint's eyes narrowed as he heard the distinctive sound of machine gun fire pattering off Mjolnir; but Natasha was already gone, and he'd never catch up if he didn't follow her.  
  
Happy thought for a moment, then drove the car calmly over to a nice parking position beside the open manhole, and turned the radio on. This time, he decided, he would be quite happy to keep the car running for their inevitable getaway, although he's not sure how they intend to fit the rescuees in the vehicle as well...  
  
\----  
  
Bruce followed Tony's instructions with exaggerated patience.  
  
Alas, Tony's voice just got more shrill and demanding as each of his cunning plans failed. Banner had broken both their belt buckles trying various angles of attack, and Stark kept calling him clumsy and incompetent, which did not exactly help.   
  
Neither did Pepper finding the strength for another bout of raw-throated, hysterical screaming, which naturally improved Stark's mood no end.  
  
"Are you sure you can't find me something to stand on?" complained Darcy. "Just, like, a little bit would help..."  
  
"I could steal everyone's shoes," suggested Banner wearily, "and stack them up under your feet, and it _still wouldn't help_ , because you've already got about that much slack in the things."  
  
"Just because you're not chained to the wall," she observed.  
  
So Bruce took off his shoes and stuck them next to the wall where she could try awkwardly to balance on them to her heart's content, which managed to shut her up for a few minutes.  
  
After wincing through Pepper's performance, Jane observed quietly, not to anyone in particular: "This really sucks."  
  
Bruce was just attempting to wedge part of the stem of Tony's shades between the wall and the plate to which the shackles were bolted - he was pretty sure this wouldn't work either, and the plans had been getting steadily more desperate and incoherent, but it seemed important to keep Tony talking - when Darcy pointed at something and said, "Look!"  
  
The door was swinging open, and they were treated to three seconds of Natasha looking sarcastic before she suddenly got this distracted look and swung smoothly around to deal with some unseen assailants.   
  
His first instinct was to rush towards the door, but he could feel the other guy's eagerness as he started towards it, and clamped right down on that, leaving him wavering uselessly in the middle of the room while someone finally got a hypodermic into Natasha's neck, and watching the fight gradually leak out of her.  
  
\----  
  
"How come I don't get any padding?" complained Darcy as he tied his shirt-sleeves loosely around Natasha's wrists.  
  
It's not exactly warm underground, but if he got it just right, he figured that the circulation shouldn't get cut off too badly. He supported her torso with his as he worked; hanging by shackles from the arms isn't exactly the best recovery position, and he wasn't sure exactly what they put in her. She was breathing, but it sounded kind of shallow.  
  
"Because you are conscious enough to keep your wrists out of serious danger," he explained calmly, as if Darcy actually wanted to know.  
  
His shoulders and back ached stubbornly and his head hurt from where they had body-checked him back into the wall. He'd thought he would surely lose it then, crush the whole roomful of them, and he was sure the two holding his arms had been afraid as they had thickened and lengthened...  
  
...but somehow he had managed to concentrate on the cold stone wall and the echoing passageway beyond the open door, the vastness and futility of the world that surrounded them, and it had passed.  
  
"Maybe my ribs are broken," she continued, obstinately. "Maybe I'm going to die of a punctured lung, huh?"  
  
She'd managed to nail one in the knee with an unexpectedly well-aimed kick. If Natasha had been conscious at the time, he was sure she would have been proud.  
  
"If your ribs are broken," he replied patiently, "the best thing you can do is _stop talking_."  
  
\----  
  
"There's no way we can contain him. Give him the runaround, yes. But we've already lost half a dozen, fourteen between them..."  
  
"Surely you can nail the archer?"  
  
"Before the one with the hammer breaks out of our little cordon? Not necessarily."  
  
"Oh well - this will have to do. I must say, I'm disappointed they didn't bring the Captain. The playboy, the monster and the girls; it doesn't quite have the same... _resonance_."  
  
"Still, it should be quite entertaining on the evening news."  
  
"Oh yes. And I don't expect the Initiative will survive this little incident..."  
  
\----  
  
Tony kept suggesting ways that Banner could secure Natasha to the wall in a more favourable position and get back to his latest escape scheme, but trying to adequately support her in the way that she can breathe most easily without holding anything he didn't want her to wake up with him touching is all he could do without thinking too hard.  
  
And he knew that if he let the true extent of how fucked up their situation was get through to his conscious mind, he wouldn't be able to hold himself back.  
  
He didn't hear the subtle sigh of the releasing gas cylinder; he noticed Tony break off in mid-rant and look sharply up at something invisible. "Gas," Tony said, helpfully. "What more do they want from us?"  
  
Banner sniffed nervously, and began to consider one of those schemes for attaching Natasha's shoulders to the shackles somehow, but he was still not sure he wouldn't just end up with her strangling on the arrangement.  
  
There was no particular smell in the air, but that didn't mean anything. He began to inventory his mental status in a paranoid fashion, looking for the effects of various kinds of anaesthetic, poison gasses, truth serums...  
  
...now, _that_ part of him was _not_ meant to be misbehaving.  
  
He felt Natasha's breath catch in a slightly different pattern, and instinctively dropped her and backed off to a safe distance; not a moment too soon, as she pulled herself up and looked quickly around her, still half-drugged.  
  
"What's happening?" she demanded.  
  
"We were ambushed," he explained, carefully. "Then, when you were fighting them off at the door, someone got a needle into the back of your neck. I'm still not sure what was in it..."  
  
The world shifted, quite alarmingly, sideways. It took him a moment to realise that it hadn't, really; he had just been intensely dizzy. And now there was a new strange thrumming in his veins, and Natasha was looking at him with a weird mixture of confusion, concern... and disgust.  
  
He quickly looked away, trying to school his face, to clear his head. "And they've released..."  
  
"Some kind of gas," Tony finished for him. "Because being hung on a wall wasn't irritating enough. Oh, and I bet that little glass panel up there? I don't expect anyone else has noticed it. That's got to be a camera."  
  
This was not... not usually why his pants felt uncomfortably tight.   
  
"Shit," said Bruce, with some feeling.  
  
"You okay?" asked Darcy, with a touching amount of genuine concern.  
  
"No," he said, turning away entirely and leaning against the opposite wall, his head on his arm, hoping that blanking everything out would help. It didn't. His imagination was quite happy to go into overdrive, mentally undressing the other occupants of the room, despite his attempts to think of something, anything else. He groaned, quietly.  
  
"Finally going to bust us out of here, are you?" asked Tony, hopefully. "Door didn't look that sturdy..."  
  
For a moment, he actually tried - tried to summon up the strength, tried to wake up the other guy. If he could just do it for a moment, if he could propel himself toward the door, blunder one way down the corridor, maybe they could escape down the other half of the passage before it finished collapsing around him. But he found himself flailing helplessly in darkness. Just when he needed him the most, the other guy was buried too deep - sleepy, almost contented, like the bastard always got when he...  
  
...when he was...  
  
"Rrgh," he managed, weakly. There was another monster rising within him: no less familiar, but much more common than his... other incarnation. He had never had much trouble pushing it away in the past; plenty of practice in his awkward and nerdy adolescence, after all.   
  
But what he really needed was to retreat somewhere private and, well, give it what it wanted, more or less. With everyone's eyes on him, he had no idea how he could still be hard, let alone even think about... relieving himself.  
  
"Some kind of gas?" asked Natasha, hoping for more details.  
  
"Doesn't seem to be doing anything to us," Tony reports, "but it's blatantly doing a number on poor Banner over there. I guess this is the bit where we all watch him suffer and die, or something. No offence!"  
  
Bruce considered telling the drifting Tony voice that was interrupting his attempt to control his reverie to fuck off, but didn't trust himself to speak.  
  
"So, yeah, did you bring anyone else with you to the Goon Palace, or did you expect to spring us all on your lonesome?" Tony asked Natasha, to pass the time.  
  
Feeling his way along the wall, Bruce stumbled sideways and crumpled to his knees in a corner, facing the two adjoining walls. Maybe if he crouched small around it, shielding himself from their view, he could get it done before they noticed what he is doing.  
  
"Fuck off," Natasha suggested to Tony, as she began to concentrate on something; she pulled gently on the restraint as if gauging something, looked pained - in anticipation, not in current injury - and moving her fingers together, began to rotate her wrists, slowly, back and forth.  
  
Tony didn't know which way to look; he didn't, he really didn't, want to look at Pepper, but he didn't particularly want to watch Natasha or Bruce quietly suffering either.  
  
Nor did he want to look at the cave wall, and let himself pay too much attention to where he was and that he was stuck there. He was sure that none of them really wanted to hear him seriously freaking out.  
  
Bruce bit practically right through his lip trying to remain silent; he had sunk his hands into his loose waistband and found it hot and almost painful to the touch, had freed his ridiculous erection from the weak elastic of his boxers, and he just held it for a moment, contemplating how to proceed.   
  
Usually he was fast and efficient, but given that just touching it made him want to emit a deep-throated, animal scream, he didn't think that was going to work very well. His work-worn, calloused hands burned against the taut surface of it; the traitor that he assumed every man carries in his mind told him how much better it would be _inside_ one of them, his hands on Darcy's ample breasts, or exploring Natasha's perfect musculature, or gazing up into Jane's sparkling eyes...  
  
...it should be working by now, but while the yearning - and the _straining_ \- were stronger, he felt no closer to the edge.  
  
\----  
  
"I'm bored," declared Darcy.  
  
Tony looked over at her, past Pepper, who was suspended between them, and had not made a noise for some time, preferring to stare straight ahead into the middle distance, rigid with horror.  
  
"Is that really the worst thing for you here?" he asked, incredulous. "That you're _bored_?"  
  
"Well, I already complained about everything else," she offered, nonchalantly.  
  
"How did I end up stuck down here with you jokers?" Tony wondered aloud.  
  
Bruce, incredibly reluctantly, unwrapped his hands from around his penis and took them out of his pants. He couldn't do anything useful stuck like that. He might not be able to do anything anyway, but at least he could put it back in his pants and stand up and...  
  
And what? He didn't even want to look at them. He'd never been any good at asking for help.  
  
Then he heard Natasha. She made a small, concentrated, pained noise; a determined sound, a sound that had hitherto been drowned out by Darcy and Tony's occasional contributions to the background noise.   
  
Before he could stop himself, he looked up, in her direction, to see if there was anything he could do to help.  
  
She was obviously thinking about something else, but that didn't stop her catching his eye and diagnosing everything about his current state in one narrowing glance.  
  
"Stark," she said, through slightly gritted teeth, still obviously distracted - and Bruce finally noticed the blood gently running down her arms, and how there was significantly less hand poking out of the top of her shackles than he had expected, and tries not to think about that too hard either, because his medical concern for her was getting all mixed up with his libido and he did _not_ want any kind of association between sex and... mutilation...  
  
"Do you think that it's possible the gas is only affecting Banner?" Natasha concluded.  
  
"Why don't you ask him?" Tony replied, rolling his eyes. "He's the biologist..."  
  
"I'm..." It was meant to be "I'm actually qualified in physics, I just taught myself basic doctor stuff," but it was obvious that words were not his friend at the moment, and the urge to say something distinctly less innocuous had sent him reeling back against the wall.  
  
Darcy squinted slightly at him, and then looked distinctly incredulous. "Oh god," she said. "They've, like, sprayed him with sex pollen or something, haven't they?"  
  
Natasha let out a pained hiss, and took a deep breath and looked into the middle distance for a moment, to re-focus; she had let her hands relax for a moment while she thought about it, which had been a terrible idea. Banner's gaze locked onto her again, and he couldn't keep the frank lust out of his eyes before he managed to drag his attention away and back to the harmless floor.  
  
"Uh," said Darcy. "Is this one of those things where you die if you don't get any?" She seemed at least genuinely curious.  
  
"I... don't... know..." managed Banner, eyes fixed firmly on the ground, leaning against the side wall. "It's... not usually a problem... under a day or so..."  
  
"Look," continued Darcy; and Tony realised where this was going. He attempted to facepalm, momentarily forgetting that he was shackled to the wall, and clanked uncomfortably a bit before settling on looking slightly queasy.  
  
"Really?" Tony settled for asking.  
  
"Oh, you shut up," Darcy rallied. "I don't see you volunteering. You can, like, look away and think of wiring diagrams, or something. And, I don't know, with your reputation - "  
  
"I..." Tony was about to protest something about how the focus had always been _him_ , or that he thought of Bruce like a _brother_ , or that... or that he hadn't, since Pepper... but he didn't want to think about that, with her catatonic and maybe never recovering enough to hand in her resignation again...  
  
"You..." Bruce tried to ask, awkwardly. "I..." He felt lower than dirt; he couldn't, he just couldn't, it wasn't fair to take... she would never look twice at him if it wasn't for... and there was... well, there wasn't really anyone else any more, but...  
  
"Oh, for goodness sake," said Darcy, good-naturedly. "Stop being so melodramatic about it. And I'm afraid you've got to do all the work, because," she rattles her chains briefly, "my hands are kind of tied."  
  
"...really?" he managed to choke out.  
  
"Really," she reassured him. "After all," she said, teasingly, "when else am I going to get a chance without worrying that the Other Guy might come for a visit?"  
  
"...fuck." He let himself look up, to look at her face; grinning, but kind of uncertain, trying to put a brave face on it. "I... I don't..."  
  
"Oh god," she said, "do I have to talk you through it? You have, like, done it before, right?"  
  
"Yes," he said. It was a little easier, thinking was a little clearer, as long as he was moving towards her.  
  
Jane glanced over in their direction. "Ew, really?" she contributed.  
  
"You can shut up too," replied Darcy. "Go back to sleep, or whatever you've been doing zoning out over there like a proper dungeon princess."  
  
"I _am_ asleep," asserted Jane. "I just don't know how to wake up. And I didn't think my subconscious was that wrong."  
  
"Well, hurry up and dream us up your boyfriend, then," suggested Darcy. "Meanwhile," and she thrust out her breasts as best she could, to show willing, "maybe we can do something about at least one person's problems, huh?"  
  
"You're..." he began, reaching out tentatively towards her, "you're really sure?" She was close enough to touch, and it would be hopelessly overwhelming, if he didn't have so much practice at not being overwhelmed.  
  
She nodded, leans towards his hand, which he ran through her hair - gently, almost wonderingly. "I'm sure," she said. "As long as we can rely on this rack of _disgusting perverts_ to avert their eyes," she said a little louder, for the peanut gallery.  
  
"Uh," said Tony. "Is this a good time to remind you that we're, you know, on Candid Camera?"  
  
"Fuck," moaned Bruce. He had managed to forget that little detail, and now he is so close, so close that he can feel her gentle warmth on his cold, bare chest, the pull was so magnetic that he couldn't push himself away from her; and anyway, since when did he care about a little bad publicity?  
  
If he could deal with The Other Guy on national news, he could totally deal with a sex tape; it wasn't as if she hadn't made the first move.  
  
"Yes, that's the idea," Darcy encouraged him. "C'mon, you can at least give the girls some attention."  
  
"Things I didn't want to hear," began Tony, but Darcy cut him off swiftly.  
  
"What did I say about the shutting up?" she interrupted him, and for once he subsided.  
  
Which was pretty much the opposite of what Bruce was doing.  
  
He buried his awkward, clumsy hands under her warm blouse, rising up her soft and yielding sides to the impressive engineering works that contained her 'girls'. He brought his face right up to hers, and asked, again, permission with his eyes.  
  
He figured that her eye-rolling and surging forwards to kiss him firmly was her idea of consent.  
  
It was no good; it was so good, but the cause of all this awkwardness could not be denied. He moved his hands reluctantly down from her huge, overflowing breasts, back down her sides, and to the clasp of her pants, fumbling with the fastening as she came up for air and changed angles. If she still had a lack of enthusiasm for the idea, it was undetectable; she seemed to have given herself fully to the embrace.  
  
Finally, he managed to get her trousers undone, and shoved his own - and his boxers - roughly down around his hips. He was sure the others were making expressions of disgust, if they hadn't already turned away; but that was their problem. As he gently shifted her panties down her legs, just slightly, she pulled away just enough to rub noses and make a satisfied "Mmm," sound.  
  
He wondered vaguely whether she was still just encouraging him, making the best of it; ran questing hands across her inner thighs, and was rewarded with an answering shiver. Not, he thought, a shudder; a couple of times he had made the mistake of agreeing to fall into bed with women who turned out to be grateful for his help, rather than attracted to him, and he thought he knew the difference by now.  
  
As he cautiously explored her, she giggled - definitely not just like he'd tickled her, like she was actually amused by something. He paused for a moment, which just made her laugh again.  
  
Then she bit his nose, gently, which made him look up in surprise.  
  
"Stop _thinking_ so much," she chuckled, sticking out her tongue to lick the tip of his nose. "I'm sure your brainiac girlfriends love it, but I am," and she chuckled again, self-deprecating, "not some kind of virginial young..."  
  
He did not need any more encouragement. His mouth found hers mid-word and his eager cock sought an opening, his arms wrapped around her, hungrily clutching her back as he found the right angle and dissolved, almost, into that smooth and calming embrace.  
  
Holding on desperately, by blind instinct, to her body, cushioning her with his arms almost inadvertently, almost washed away, all thought driven out by the sensation; he moved gently in and out as his need guided him, barely hearing her whisper, "c'mon, faster"...  
  
And that was when the world exploded.  
  
"Thor!" exclaimed Jane. "Thank god, maybe I can wake up now!"  
  
"Jane!" exclaimed a familiar voice from the wreckage of the door. "If they have harmed you they will pay a hundred-fold!"  
  
Darcy shook her head in disbelief as Bruce miserably disengaged and attempted to get his underwear and trousers back in good order before Thor was finished breaking the shackles very carefully off Jane, and then Tony...  
  
"You keep that hammer away from me," Natasha warned him. With one last tug and grimace, she pulled her bloodied hands the rest of the way out of the shackles. "I think you're going to have to carry Pepper," she advised Thor, as he carefully freed her.  
  
Bruce suddenly realised that Darcy had her hands trapped and was looking distinctly unimpressed. Tony was still not looking over in their direction, pointedly; shame-faced, he crept back over and did up her trousers, which was much easier now he could actually look at them - although it was made more difficult by the fact that, oh no, he was beginning to stir in his own trousers _again,_ already...  
  
After taking extra care over Pepper's release - helping her slide gracefully down the wall to sit dazed at the base of it for a moment - Thor turned to Darcy's restraints. There was no way, Banner thought, that he could not notice the general disarray - or the _smell_ of it - but Thor made no mention of it.  
  
Of course - why would he? Apparently in Asgard they fuck in adversity all the time, or so it seemed from the endless heroic tales he regaled them with given half a chance.  
  
No. No, that was a bad thought. Amongst the things he did not need to be thinking about at the moment, the sheaths available for his rapidly recharging weapon on the person of certain Norse gods were quite high on the list.  
  
"We really need to get Bruce some fresh air," said Jane, shakily. She was beginning to think that this might be real after all.  
  
Tony had dropped into a crouch next to Pepper, almost as oblivious to the rest of the world as she had become as a defence against intolerable circumstances, gently stroking her hair and trying to impart some life to her closed eyes by gazing at them intensely enough.  
  
"We have many enemies left to defeat!" insisted Thor. "You can carry your lady, man of iron? And the rest of us can walk?"  
  
Flexing his arms experimentally, Tony looked distinctly dubious about the prospect of carrying anything. "If I had my suit," he began, almost apologetically.  
  
"Well, of course I brought your suit," replied another familiar voice, peering around the door frame, apparently from above. "Here; catch." And Clint threw a familiar suitcase underarm in Tony's direction; Tony dodged sideways, caught the side of it, and let it start forming around his arms.  
  
\----  
  
"So, uh," began Bruce - afterwards, when they were all firmly installed in Stark Tower, although the eponymous playboy was off sulking somewhere. It was not exactly a surprise - after Pepper was installed in a hospital bed and let herself recover a little, her first words were to tell him to go away, that she never wants to see him, or any of them, ever again.  
  
"Uh?" asked Darcy. She was alternating rubbing her wrists expressively - she had been quite offended when the medics told her there was nothing really wrong with them that wouldn't clear up on its own in a couple of days - with sampling the extensive spread of take-out that she had bullied JARVIS into ordering.  
  
"You're," he said. "I mean," he tries again.  
  
"I'm on the pill," she said, "if that's what you mean."  
  
"Oh," he said. "Good."  
  
And that was the last time that either of them ever mentioned it.


End file.
